1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and a technique related thereto.
2. Related Art
There are techniques for setting a dead area (an area in which manual input by an operator cannot be received) around the entire perimeter of each software key in operation screens of image forming apparatuses in order to prevent users from mishitting software keys disposed close to one another. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-81933 (Patent Document 1) discloses a technique for setting a dead area around (the entire perimeter of each operation key displayed on a liquid crystal display (LCD) of an image forming apparatus.
There are also techniques for remotely operating image forming apparatuses using external terminals. With these techniques, remote operation images transferred from an image forming apparatus to an external terminal are used to remotely operate the image forming apparatus.
With the techniques for remotely operating an image forming apparatus, it may be required to not only remotely operate operation screens of the image forming apparatus but also remotely operate hardware keys of the image forming apparatus. In this case, for example, it is conceivable that a composite image generated by combining an operation screen image and a hardware key area image is used as a remote operation image, the operation screen image corresponding to an operation screen of the image forming apparatus, and the hardware key area image being an image of an area that includes hardware key images corresponding respectively to hardware keys of the image forming apparatus.
In such a composite image (remote operation image) generated by combining the two images, however, a plurality of software keys (also referred to as a “software key group”) within the operation screen image and a plurality of hardware key images (also referred to as a “hardware key image group”) within the hardware key area image may be undesirably disposed too close to each other, increasing the likelihood of mishitting of the keys.
In contrast, the application of the technique of Patent Document 1 described above allows a dead area to be set around the entire perimeter of each software key in the software key group and around the entire perimeter of each hardware key image in the hardware key image group. The dead areas provided between the software keys and the hardware key images make it possible to prevent users from mishitting the keys and the images.
However, if, for example, individual hardware key images in the hardware key image group are disposed close to one another similarly to the close disposition of the software key group and the hardware key image group, the following problem may occur. Specifically, the dead area set around the entire perimeter of one hardware key image in the hardware key image group may be superimposed on another hardware key image adjacent to the hardware key image. This consequently narrows a sensitive area (an area in which manual input by an operator can be received) of the other hardware key image and ultimately reduces the operability of the entire hardware key image group.
Such a problem can also occur with the other two types of key groups.